I'd like to work on the eo-en pair along with Jacob and Darshak (and
Hector?).
Can someone please give my souceforge account (brinerustle) access to
commit in svn?
I hope eventually to use apertium to conduct experiments in the creation of
materials for language study. I am including info below about my project
below in case anyone is interested in getting involved.
thanks,
Brian
The experiment is to allow students and teachers to use MT to create
materials for grammar instruction. The project is to create dictionaries to
automate the creation of literal translations, or calques
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque>, for a language instruction technique
which is called mother tongue mirroring
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_tongue_mirroring>, a technique which
allows students to acquire grammatical structures without abstractions. As
far as I know, know one has ever automated the process using MT and
provided students and teachers with en endless source of calques. The term
mother tongue mirroring was coined by Wolfgang Butzkamm, I'm including an
excerpt of his article Teaching Grammar Bilinguall
<http://fremdsprachendidaktik.de/?p=99>y which briefly explains the
technique below with a single example. I know this is kind of an odd use of
apertium, given the incredible efforts that are made so that apertium
DOESN'T spit out literal translations, but apertium should work for the
needs of the project. If you'd like to collaborate, please get in touch!
Wolfgang Butzkamm:
Mother Tongue Mirroring.... is a kind of literal translation adapted for
teaching purposes. It is optimal when learners have difficulties in parsing
and processing foreign sentences correctly.
In our mother tongue we see through the words to the meaning so
automatically and effortlessly that we normally don’t pay attention to how
things are said. But a foreign language often confronts us with bizarre,
unheard-of, unthought-of ways of organizing thoughts. Here we need the
clearest possible understanding not only of what is meant, but of what is
actually said. We need to identify the meaning components and where they
appear in a foreign language sentence, and mirroring is an elegant and
highly time efficient way of just doing this. An excellent way of making
foreign constructions immediately transparent. Let us suppose you’ve come
across the following questions in Chinese and know what they mean:
Mandarin
nán bù nán? 难不难?hǎo bù hǎo? 好不好? Is it difficult?Is it good?
Now – is knowing what it means really enough? For a tourist, perhaps, but
not for language learners. For them, making a global form-meaning
connection is necessary, but not sufficient. They must also know how this
idea is expressed in Mandarin. A *double comprehension* is both necessary
and sufficient: a normal, situational understanding of the phrase and a
formal, structural understanding. The latter can be smoothly provided by
mirroring the phrase in English: Difficult, not difficult? Good, not good?
This is the way the Chinese say it. Only now can we make our own questions
even if we have never heard them before:
Mandarin
guì bù guì? 贵不贵?yuǎn bù yuǎn? 远不远? Is it
expensive?*Expensive, not expensive?Is it far?*far, not far?
By making the mother tongue dovetail with the foreign language
construction, we achieve an uncomplicated clarity which grammatical
explanations seldom have.
For more examples, one can also look at pg 106-109 of Open the Door to
English with Your Native Language: The Role of theMother Tongue in English
Language Teaching in China
<http://darwin.bth.rwth-aachen.de/opus3/volltexte/2010/3236/pdf/3236.pdf>
anyone interested in joining me in this project or following the experiment
is very welcome...
Brian
On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 5:52 PM, Bernard Chardonneau <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Following my announcement of Apertium presentation and workshops in
> Montpellier, Brian phoned me for something special. He spoked about
> changing Apertium tools code. I never studied it.
>
> But for the thing he would like to do, I think that can be done just
> working on language pair file. And I think it's better to use this
> mailing list to discuss of that.
>
>
> > Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2014 11:13:22 +0200
> > From: Brian Russell <[email protected]>
> > To: Bernard Chardonneau <[email protected]>
> > Subject: Re: [Apertium-stuff] Apertium at RMLL 2014 in Montpellier
> >
> > Hello Bernard,
> >
> > I would like to create a fork of apertium. The goal is to create language
> > teaching materials. I hope to create an engine which will automatize
> > literal (word-to-word) translation. The technique, mother tongue
> mirroring
> > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_tongue_mirroring>, is quite old,
> but
> > has never yet been widely used in language instruction. So I think
> apertum
> > is ideal, I just need to get it to ignore the rules and return a literal
> > translation...
> >
> > I hope to be able to ask you details about the coding not just of the XML
> > of the monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, but also of the transfer
> > rules?
> >
> > Ideally I would like to have to option to get it to ignore certain
> modules
> > or perhaps create a couple new ones directly from the C++/Python....
> >
> > If that's something you don't know anything about, maybe we can look if
> > there is a way this can be achieved directly via the transfer rules
> >
> > see you wednesday!
> >
> > merci beaucoup!
> > Brian
> >
> >
> Hello,
>
> After watching the wikipedia page, I am not sure the problem is to change
> something in Apertium tools.
>
> I think the problem would be rather to take off multiwords from
> dictionaries
> to tranlate only single words.
>
> For transfer rules except for very close languages, they may be needed to
> get more than just lemmas after translating.
>
> For instance, the esperanto sentence "La kato ludas" would only give
> #Le #chat #jouer without transfer rule ("La katinoj ludas" would give the
> same result).
>
> The reason is :
> - gender and number atributes are needed for the French lemma "Le"
> - nominative attribute (the difference between kato and katon) has no sense
> in French, so this information must be taken off
> - the verb in French must be at 3rd person singular (or plural with
> katinoj)
>
> So, you still need transfer rules, but may be more simple one without
> reordering
> groups of words and things like that.
>
>
> See you Wednesday.
>
>
>
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